Just a quick link to a really good article I read at ZDNet about Cassatt. Cassatt makes some really cool products and while I have a much longer blog post planned about them and their innovation, it is Thanksgiving......so......more later. :)

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Cedar Falls, Iowa based TEAM Companies held a ground breaking ceremony Monday for their new facility in Waukee, a suburb of Des Moines. Like their Madison facility, the 46,000 sq. ft. data center will be built in 3 phases. The first phase is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2009 and will cost $15 million to build.

TEAM will jointly own and operate the facility with Iowa Health System, the state's largest health care provider.

Iowa Health System President and CEO William B. Leaver said Iowa Health System and TEAM Companies have had a multi-year relationship that has served its employees and patients well. "When we're dealing with millions of records every year that contain confidential and critical information, it requires the utmost care and expertise," Leaver said. "Iowa Health System and TEAM Companies thoroughly and completely understand the responsibility associated with maintaining and managing this data. We don't take that lightly and never will"

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

SC08 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) has been going on this week and there are a number of interesting links as a result:

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm points out that the conference is really (or has become) a Data Center conference.

The Austin American-Statesman previews the conference and points out that Sun will bus people to their Ranger installation at UT, and Dell will bus people to UT's main campus to see Stallion, their advanced computer visualization system.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory selects DataDirect Network Storage to power one of the largest and fastest file systems in the world. "48 S2a9900 High Performance storage platforms deliver up to 240 Gigabytes per second of performance across 10 Petabytes". Wow!

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Next Monday, the Top500 list comes out for the second half of 2008. I am not involved with super computers at all, but the geek in me loves to follow who has the fastest computer in the world. eWeek.com reports that the Cray Jaguar is set to top the IBM Roadrunner in the #1 position. The XT Jaguar now offers a performance of more than 1 quadrillion calculations (1 petaflop) per second.

"The Cray XT Jaguar system now boasts of 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors, along with 362 terabytes of system memory and a 10-petabyte file system. Jaguar also now offers 362 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and an I/O bandwidth of 284 gigabytes per second."

The supercomputer belongs to the DOE and resides at their Oak Ridge National Laboratory. See their press release here.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Level3 is an interesting company to watch. Their stock closed under $1 today, but I think there is some real potential for this company to take off. Level3 started out in 2008 with a focus on the CDN Market. You can follow events on the archives at Data Center Knowledge, but since then they have had a change in CEO, acquired IBM's CDN patents, and dramatically increased the capacity of their CDN.

I ran across two things today that put Level3 on my radar. The first was an article at the BusinessofVideo.com blog about the Level3 Broadcast Encoding Centers. These encoding centers are a part of their ecosystem offerings that the article discusses.

"The new broadcast centers allows level 3 to provide support for encoding up to 24 simultaneous live events in Windows Media, Flash or Move Networks formats. And with both broadcast centers tied into Level 3's Vyvx offering, the company can also ingest video directly from customer's locations and downlink and uplink video from nearly 95% of the world's satellites"

The second item I found on the Level3 website -- an investor presentation that goes over the usual stock and company performance data.... but the first half of slides in the show really drive home the market they are in, how they plan to attack the opportunity, and really not a bad summary of where things are going in the market.

Kevin Rose, of digg.com and Revision3 fame .... I believe..... recently said he stopped all cable and satellite services in favor of watching everything on his computer. Maybe the IPTV movement will be the thing to watch in 2009. I know I am certainly watching a lot more shows/episodes/podcasts/whatever online anyway.

Maybe I spoke too soon in my last post about Iceland. I ran across a few things that might counter some of the arguments made against the country. First, there is news that the economic / banking crisis in Iceland is being resolved. This may take a while, but it at least looks like they will come out of the crisis favorably.

Second -- there are some new stories I've found that may dispell any negatives about connectivity to Iceland. Capacity magazine reports that "subsea cable operator E-Farice has said that the final leg of its Danice cable system is underway." When complete some early next year, it will provide the country with a huge volume of additional capacity and full redundancy.

"The Danice system will comprise a four-fiber pair link between Iceland and Denmark, with initial capacity of 100Gb and full potential capacity of 5.1Tb. Using DWDM, the system will support the transmission of 128 10Gb wavelengths on each pair.

Nothing ups the priority and urgency of finishing a contract like getting press about missed deadlines and deliverables. According to the Austin American-Statesman, IBM's $863 Million contract is on the line if they don't resolve a data backup issue.

"The governor expects the issue will be resolved to the full satisfaction of the state," said Allison Castle, the governor's spokeswoman, so that termination of the contract will not be necessary"

With 9 pages of comments on the article, it apparently is a sore spot to many. One commenter wrote "The Office TV series has nothing on the State of Texas agencies". :)

Monday, November 03, 2008

The data center stock index I have been tracking closed last week at $20.42. It started the week at $17.66 and just kept on climbing. It will be interesting to see if election day/week has any affect on it.

I have several stocks that I would like to add to the list -- I just want to take one more crack at using the Google spreadsheet to get historical data before starting over with the new stock list.

DataCenterKnowledge.com has an October review of data center stocks today also. Call it a hunch, but I think Terremark will be one to watch -- they have some pretty cool things going on and I think there is a ton of potential there.